There are three main characters in my story. Since the first two of the aliens resemble humans, I decided to call them ahmans. Dobi and Poppi, are ahmans, Dobi is younger than Poppi, at 20 years old, and still unsure of life and what will come. This character is the helper and friend of Poppi. Dobi has light blond hair and stands at 6 feet tallPoppi is much older, has had children in the past and just about finished raising an offspring. Poppi also has blondish hair and stands about 6'5" tall. The third main character is a human named Alice. Alice, standing at 5'8" tall at the current age of 32, became a worker on the Moon with one of the mining companies established there. She had been married and divorced; dating the company's manager didn't pan out well either. She set her eyes on Mars, not to look for a husband but just to live her life now in her thirties. Most of the workers on the moon were men. She was trying to write a psychological paper about isolation on the base aside from her other duties, and these men didn't want to share. Most of the men came to the moon were the sort that like being alone, except when they got together for beer and cards. When a job opened up on Mars and her relationship ended, she decided to apply and bring her cat with her.I set my story to begin far away in another solar system where two of my main characters live. After their ancestors had been pushed into outer space due to a planetary disaster, the current inhabitants became more adapt at space exploring. Even though their technology is 2000 years ahead of ours, I wanted these characters to be similar to us in appearance and actions. The story portrays a reflection of ourselves and what our thinking may be in our future. Two themes flow through my story. I have always been bothered by the constant conflict between men and women. So why not dissolve this problem with my characters by making them single entities. By doing this, I met another challenge. Since they weren't hes or shes, I could not refer to them by the pronouns we normally use: he, she, him, and her. I have read sci-fi stories about such creatures but I wanted these people to function as close to us as possible. In my research I chose the kangaroo with its unusual gestation design and pouch, and then I read about the garibaldi fish that will function as a male when none are available. Like us, my characters explore the galaxy to see if there are others like themselves out in the universe. Now that the gender problem is solved, things are still not perfect. We as humans have destroyed all of our different species in our past, what if they still had other species of their kind still living? How would they handle that? I asked myself, what would we do once we escape our solar system and found another species out there? Look at what we have done to people and lands our ancestors have conquered in the past? Are we as humans destined to repeat our history? The other theme I tried to depict was where will our mindset about social issues or traditions be heading in 300 years. Look at what has happened to our views on many ideas in the last 500 years. I also expect that we would have started to settle on our Moon and Mars, so I placed my characters in this background.

I have the first three chapters pretty much finished, I am just waiting on my people that are critiquing it. I know you can't read what is on the second picture but click on the blogging link and go to Credits or just click on the picture above, it has a disclaimer and synopsis that is the same.

What we do to make our environment easier to live in. Will we decorate our station's portals to seem like Mars is less hostile? Do we not paste up memories upon a mirror or window in our houses? Here my heroine notices something out of the ordinary as she boards the Martian station:-Then a curious sight came into view as she walked through the narrow hallway. Looking through one of the ‘windows’ to her right side, three feet wide by four feet, she saw a painted desert scene. “Officer, what is this?” Alice asked as she stopped and motioned toward one of the ‘windows.’“That is our small attempt to make this sterile place more like home,” he explained, “You will see more up ahead,” he replied as started to move on. The window had pictures of cactus and palm trees painted in the corners with a prospectively ink drawn camel ‘standing’ near an adobe house upon the red sand outside. Again other windows captured pictures of other desert scenes from Earth, some had pyramids, and others had other desert plants such as Ocotillos, Chollas and beavertails. It did make one feel like the planet wasn’t so sterile after all.-

The universe cannot be sterile. Is there a force in the universe that guides us empirically upward toward the primate style? Could other people have evolved and developed as we have? Would they look like us? What if another species of people found us? Would they think like us? Would they harm us? What would be our actions be?Taking place three hundred years in the future, as we begin to settle our Moon and Mars, another world of people is just beginning to save theirs. All of a sudden these new people enter our lives bringing questions we have to ask ourselves.

Tunnels are complex feats of engineering. Many procedures has to be completed before the tunnel becomes useable. In reading about tunnels for my book, I learned that the ceiling of the tunnel is called the crown. Interestingly enough, in the book, The Main Corpse by Diane Mott Davidson, she called the ceiling the 'back' as in referring to a backbone. But in the mining dictionary, at www.tunnels.mottmac.com used the terminology 'crown' as the ceiling or the top of the tunnel. There was an agreement when the walls were described as 'ribs.' After the ribs are in place a fabric of steel and or polypropylene plastic was placed or cadded over the ribs to create a smooth surface on which cleaning could be easily done. By the way the book, The Main Corpse is excellent reading with lots of action and recipes.

Air vents or shafts have to be placed in a tunnel or mine to keep the air oxygenated. Here is a section of my book that explains this part:"Air shafts, allowing air or escape to the surface, was not built into this system due to the Mars atmosphere outside. Instead, safe rooms, oxygen access points or escape sets, and ventilation piping throughout the tunnel were installed every thirty feet or nine meters along the tunnel’s walls.""The running tunnel design had been opened up to allow space below the Interview Room to retract if need be. Ahmans and humans worked together, still in their atmospheric suits, to place wiring, lights, sewer connections and communication devices throughout the tunnels. The height of the passageway grew to twenty feet. The walls were then cladded with a mixture of polypropylene plastic and Mars cement from heating the frozen soil and setting concrete, an accelerator recipe the ahmans gladly shared.

I use Word to write my story. It is absolutely not user friendly. But thanks to my writing friends and the internet I found the small feature under Page Layout to fix my problem. If you have several pages that are interrupted by a Chapter, you would like to use a page break. What happen when the previous page scoots down to the middle of the page and won't align itself with the top margin. Go to Page Layout, then click on the tiny tiny arrow on the right side of the tab. There you will see Page Setup. Click on Layout. The Vertical alignment should be set for TOP. Problem solved.

The nuclear subterrene (rhymes with submarine) was designed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico. A number of patents were filed by scientists at Los Alamos, a few federal technical documents were written

Digging and construction machines becames a part of my bookwhen tunneling under the surface of Mars became a focus in the story. Rather than build on the surface, exposed to the violentelements, my characters tunnel underground. Unknown to everyone, the winds have another trick up its sleeve.Here's a couple of paragraphs from the book:"It was a slow process, using these digging tools. They were first developed on the Moon and had to run on low oxygen using special fuels and oils that could take the freezing temperatures. Many times one of these machines broke a front pinnacle or a gear would strip. Even when this happened, the vibration did not stop. Either the ahman’s implements continued, or if they stopped, the human machines were still boring away. About fifty to a hundred feet a day could be dug depending on how soft the soil was, how fast the mechanical screw delivered dirt and muck into the transport carts to the surface, and waiting during down times for new cutting parts after they wore out. Stand time, as it was termed, was the final time everything held together and their work was finished in a particular spot.

The tunnel had been opened up to allow space below the Interview Room to retract if need be. Ahmans and humans worked together, still in their atmospheric suits, to place wiring, lights, sewer connections and communication devices throughout the tunnels. The height of the tunnels grew to twenty feet. The walls were then covered with a mixture of polypropylene plastic and Mars cement from heating the frozen soil, a recipe the ahmans gladly shared." - A Nation